Humor in relationships: what laughter tells you

Adam and Hannah have a sentence between them, "one more bend", and it makes both of them laugh every single time. It comes from a walking trip where they lost the path in the hills and arrived at the same footbridge three times. Anyone else at the table hears three ordinary words and looks around, baffled.

An inside joke looks like a trifle, yet it is the densest form of shared memory a couple can own. A whole day fits into one sentence: the exact weather, the argument they had on the way, the way it ended. Couples who have a lot of them are not usually funnier than everybody else. They have simply lived through more things that were worth naming.

What happens when two people laugh at the same second

Laura Kurtz and Sara Algoe watched couples in conversation in 2015, and one specific thing interested them: how often both partners laughed at the same moment. The question was never which of the two is funnier. It was about overlap. Couples where shared laughter came up more often described their relationship as better and said they felt closer to their partner.

There is a second half to that sentence, and popular write-ups like to leave it out. This is a correlation, not an instruction. From the fact that contented couples laugh more, it does not follow that a relationship gets repaired by forcing laughter into it. The reverse order works just as well: people who are good together laugh together. Most likely it runs in both directions, and laughter is chiefly a readout rather than a lever.

Which is exactly what makes it useful. A readout can be checked as you go, without the conversation about the relationship that most people would rather avoid.

The word "simultaneous" carries more weight than it appears to. Two people cracking up in the same second have judged one situation the same way, at the same speed, with nothing agreed in advance. It is a small proof of a shared view of the world, and it cannot be faked: a polite smile can be put on, joint timing cannot.

Robert Provine, who observed laughter inside ordinary conversation and gathered his conclusions in a book from 2000, added two findings that turn the usual picture upside down. Laughter is roughly thirty times more likely in company than alone. And most laughter follows no joke at all, but a plain line of the "right, I'm off" variety.

For a couple that leads somewhere unexpected: the quality of the humor is almost beside the point. Laughter is not a reward for a good punchline, it is the sound people use to confirm they are on the same wavelength. That is why the things you laugh hardest at home could never be retold to anyone without leaving you looking foolish.

Robin Dunbar and his team showed in 2011 that pain thresholds rise after people have laughed together, and the explanation points toward endorphins. Laughter, then, does not work as a review of the joke but as an instrument of social bonding, something like the mutual grooming primates go in for, only usable on more people at once.

A thermometer that drops before the words run out

When a relationship snags, the traffic in words stays unchanged for a long while. The shopping still gets discussed and somebody still announces who is collecting the kids. Something less conspicuous disappears: the line thrown out while cooking, the remark about the weather, the face pulled across the kitchen counter. The expendable layer goes first, because nobody requests it and nobody misses it straight away.

The reason is mundane. Laughter needs a loosened body and at least a moment of feeling that nothing is about to happen. Anyone on guard does not laugh, however much they would like to.

Adam noticed it through something silly. Hannah stopped sending him photos with absurd captions, which she had done several times a week and which neither had ever mentioned. They were arguing as often as before, possibly less. Something had thinned out that neither could name until one of them spotted it.

So ask a different question than "do we argue too much?". Arguments come and go and on their own they tell you almost nothing. The more interesting question is whether anything new is still being made between the two of you that can be laughed at, or whether you are living off stories collected five years ago.

When each of you brings a different register

Humor is most often described today through four styles growing out of Rod Martin's research from 2003. They stand on two axes: the tone can be warm or sharp, and the aim points either at other people or at yourself. Out of that come the bonding style (affiliative in the academic literature), the self-enhancing, the sharp and the self-mocking, and each of them is taken apart on its own in the overview of the four humor styles. The axes are independent of each other, so nobody is only one of them; everyone carries a personal mix.

In a couple those two mixes meet, and they are rarely identical. Here are four combinations that show up in households most often, along with what they actually do.

Dacher Keltner and his colleagues described teasing in 2001 as a social game with rules of its own. Between people who trust each other it strengthens the bond, carrying the message that we are close enough to get away with this. Without trust the identical sentence wounds, though it was meant in the same spirit.

What decides the outcome is dose and timing, not the content of the joke. One and the same line can hit perfectly the first time and hurt the second, without a single word of it changing. What changed is the day of the person hearing it. A sharp register is therefore not worse than a warm one, it just asks more judgment of its owner.

Writing is trickier in this respect than speech. A text has no tone of voice and no face attached, so irony loses the marker that shows it is not an attack. A sentence that would pass at dinner as ribbing arrives on the phone as an accusation, and gets read three times over. Whoever has the sharper register at home saves a great deal of explaining with one extra half-sentence.

Early in a relationship humor also has a different job than it does after ten years. Back then it works as a filter and a calling card, which is what the piece on humor and attraction goes into. Later the question changes: it is no longer whether you can entertain your partner, but whether the two of you can land in the same mood at the same moment.

The humor that damages a relationship

The first trap is sarcasm inside an argument. Sarcasm says one thing and means another, so it adds extra work to a dispute: the other person first has to decode what you actually meant and only then respond to the substance. In a calm conversation that is seasoning; in a conflict it is a blow, and afterwards the blow gets discussed rather than the original subject. Where the line runs between irony that entertains and the barbed version that wounds is covered by a separate piece on sarcasm and irony.

John Gottman, observing couples over many years, described how of everything that can be tracked during an argument, the strongest predictor of a break-up is contempt. Sarcasm in itself is not contempt. It is, however, a register through which contempt can be reached in small steps: first a barbed remark, then the barb with an eye-roll, then a tone in which you can hear that the other one is completely off the mark.

The practical rule is boring and it works. While the dispute is being sorted out, humor stays out of it, and lightening makes sense as a full stop rather than an argument in the middle. How to run a dispute so that something actually gets settled is described in the piece on how to resolve conflicts, and nearly every procedure there has one thing in common: the substance gets agreed first, the relief comes second.

The second trap is less conspicuous and it catches people with the warmest register of all. Hannah starts talking about something unpleasant happening at work. Adam has a good line ready, he delivers it, they both laugh and the subject is gone. Nobody hurt anybody, except that next time Hannah will not start.

A joke used instead of an answer is the politest way there is of not listening. A simple order of operations helps: first a response to what was said, only then the exaggeration. A lightening that arrives two minutes later loses nothing at all, whereas the premature one takes the whole subject with it.

Self-mockery has its price too, harmless as it looks. Nobody feels small next to someone who mainly makes a target of themselves, and that is rare. At the same time it is hard to tell when such a person is genuinely not doing well, because that comes out as a funny story as well. The research on this style honestly adds that it tends to go with lower personal wellbeing. That is no diagnosis and no forecast, just a connection worth noticing.

How to find out what you actually have at home

Estimates of your own register are inaccurate in both directions. People who tease others see themselves as having perspective, and people who put themselves down call it modesty. A description of yourself sits better read alone and in peace than served to you in the middle of a row.

When you want a sharper picture than an impression, take the humor styles test separately and then swap the results. The interesting part arrives with the comparison: usually one axis turns out to be where you are close, and one where you differ more than expected. Treat it as an approximate picture and a subject for conversation, not a verdict on which of you is funnier.

While comparing, one rule pays for itself: do not read the other person's result as an indictment. A humor register is a habit learned somewhere it paid off, usually long before the two of you ever met, and habits can be worked with.

More useful than the name of a style is a concrete agreement anyway. Pick one area where nothing gets jabbed at in your house, say appearance, money or each other's parents. One zone like that does more for the atmosphere in a flat than fifty pages of character description.

Did you laugh together, or side by side?

Now for a question that only means anything if you answer it honestly: when did the two of you last laugh together? Not when you were both in a good mood in front of a series where somebody else supplied the laughs. When did you last laugh at something that came into being between the two of you.

That difference is audible. Laughing side by side is parallel traffic, two people reacting to the same stimulus from outside, and they could be sitting there with anyone at all. Laughing together has an author on both sides: one says or does something, the other catches it and adds to it. The shared laughter from the work of Kurtz and Algoe is precisely this second kind.

For one week, try noticing a single thing. How many times a day you laugh at something that came from between you rather than off a screen. Change nothing, just count. Most couples end up with a lower number than they expected, and it almost always turns out to depend not on how much they love each other but on how many minutes a day they spend together without sorting something out.

That sentence about the bend came into being at a moment when Adam and Hannah were tired, hungry and out of ideas about the route. Inside jokes cannot be planned. What can be increased is the number of situations in which they stand a chance of appearing, and most of those look pretty dull from the outside.